Sunday, December 31, 2017

December 24: We made our usual, annual jaunt to the farm for the sake of my father, sister and her brood, which are getting big enough that the eldest child is almost an adult (it would seem). Unfortunately, my daughter Kate wasn't able to make it this year due to work (she couldn't last year either, for similar reasons). When we first arrived, the girls ran around the yard in the snow, until they decided it was simply too cold.

Imagine: when I was small, that circle of snow in our yard (a driveway that circles to meet all the buildings, from shed to barn to shed to house) was where my father once put all the snow with the snowblower, making it a mound at least a storey high, which we then played upon. It hasn't been the same since he stopped doing that.

As we prepared for dinner, I amused myself by discovering a Hallowe'en cup in the cupboard (while attempting to find drinking cups for the girls) that actually held two dead spiders. God sakes.

Aoife in her red dress, who spent a great deal of time pointing at the dog and saying "dog," repeatedly. She hasn't really spent much time around dogs, but is less fearful than Rose (who doesn't care for dogs at all, up close).

In the downstairs hall of the farmhouse, a ledger of "guests" from the St. Elmo Church gifted in 1939, that included my grandfather's signature (among many other family members, on both sides of my father's family, from McLennans to Campbells and beyond). I would like to spend further time going through the slim volume, if possible.

There were a lot to pack into the homestead's kitchen, but easier than trying to get us all into Kathy's house (which we've done also). Since we have a house, we've been taking turns with our Christmasses (given our house-chaos from basement flood, I'm glad we're next year and not this; our sunroom is still packed with boxes and furniture). Aoife had been feeling better after her fever the night prior, but by mid-afternoon was pretty much conked out, either adrift on my lap or Christine's (she went back and forth for some time). After some gifting post-dinner, we dosed her with medicine and tossed kit-and-kaboodle into the car for the ride home, where the sleeping-girls were both put to bed. Rose wore her Nutcracker Suite pajamas, and Aoife wore he reindeer pajamas, but I couldn't get photos of either of them.

I still find it strange how quickly the home-Christmas moves: I suppose I'm still used to so many years of going home for a few days or a week, instead of the half-day we currently do. It goes by so quickly. But then again, we've multiple Christmases now, so it pretty much evens out, except with more travel.

December 25: We awoke in our wee house, where we set the children loose to explore their stockings, and open the presents under the tree, managing to completely forget to feed them (or anyone) breakfast (they didn't notice either). They tore through stockings and presents, and ran around enjoying a variety of new items, as well as pulling items from the day prior from the box we'd left in the living room. Rose was quick to notice that Santa had, indeed, finished the milk and the cookies we'd left on the mantle (something we did before leaving for the farm, in case Rose was asleep when we returned).

The girls were given princess dresses that they were both VERY pleased with: Rose is all about dresses and princesses, and we think Aoife just wants to be like Rose. Princess (Disney) dresses and fairy wands. As we prepared to head over to Oma's (mother-in-law's) for brunch, they wanted to bring half the house with them, it seemed. We attempted to reduce that as best we could.

At Oma's house, they had cousins to play with, as Christine's brother Michael and his family live but a few blocks away. We were there first, by an hour or so, which allowed a bit of quiet(ish), as the girls ran around, between bites of cereal Oma had for them. Michael's mother-in-law, Darlene, was also there, admiring the girls in their new dresses. We had brunch and the children played and opened presents, before Michael and his family went home for the afternoon, for the sake of children naps; I napped upstairs with Aoife. And then dinner and the cousins returning and chaos again, before everyone began to pumpkin again, and we made it home with children asleep, once more, slipped into bed.

We would clean the wrapping paper and scattered toys from the floor, we said, tomorrow. Christine went out for a bit on Boxing Day, but the rest of us didn't leave the house.

Friday, December 29, 2017

1 - How did your first
book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to
your previous? How does it feel different?

Most of Serenade was written in a frenzy during
the late summer of 2014. In many ways, it was more of me working out the
tangles from my first two chapbooks, Thrown and Mud. I press upon a lot of history of feminine brutality and
eco-disaster, do a lot of urgent lineation around flood zones. Serenade
became some metacognition of me listening to water, while realizing this was a
self-eroding reflection. Serenade changed everything, because I
let the editing process chip away at the poems’ temporality. I was doing
a lot of hiking around the tidal estuary surrounding Indian Point Energy
Center.

2 - How did you come to
poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I’m not sure. I lineated my journals as a kid,
which felt like the most personal and direct and private I could be. My
mom is a nurse. As a kid I’d go to the hospital after school and type out
occasional poems on their nurse’s station computer and tape them to the door.

3 - How long does it
take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come
quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their
final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I write in fits, I guess. I have trouble
distinguishing between drafts and new poems. An ongoing issue I have is
re-writing everything, but keeping the same title. The paradox of
Theseus’s ship? Maybe I should call this a liturgical listening process.
There are sequences of poems in all of my chapbooks and in Serenade
under the same title. I find arguments are most explicit when they’re
lineated and slowed down.

4 - Where does a poem
usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining
into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very
beginning?

I’m definitely more of a failed essayist than a
poet. I think of Serenade more of as a raging essay than I do a
collection of poems. I fixate on something and develop work in and out of
that.

5 - Are public readings
part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who
enjoys doing readings?

I love audiences, and I love being a part of one.
Friends will tell you, I cry on either side of the stage.

6 - Do you have any
theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you
trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions
are?

Serenade comes from a feminist/ecopoetic/angry
place. Lara Glenum writes in the introduction to the Gurlesque anthology
that the concept of “catharsis” is a homogenizing agent. All inherited
ideas about catharsis = a failure of imagination to conceive of catharsis
outside of the mechanics of power and control. There’s no such thing as
purity in art, outside of the modes of social and infrastructural displacement.
There’s nothing pure or timeless we gain access to through art.
This is especially important now, when this country actively neglects
populations displaced by weather. Artists and thinkers who are displaced
by canonical narratives. But do we pretend to forget history? That
in itself is a sad luxury.

I don’t answer any questions, but I definitely
wallow in my obsessions. The story of Echo shows up in Serenade,
for one. Echo is the main character in my first chapbook, Thrown.
Her inability to express her ecstasy, her sense of catharsis at the sight
of Narcissus. But she is certainly in this state of catharsis? She
communicates through her disability, which is the excess of repetition. Poems traditionally come at you with a
built-in sense of discovery, of some sort of awakening. Poems like that
for me are hand-in-hand with poems who have a project of dominance. For
me, Echo is part of an erotic dynamic conceived outside of the dynamics of
control. Which isn’t separate from her predetermined annihilation. Derrida really
tenderly talks about her story. About how she subverts Hera’s punishment by making Narcissus’s
language her own.

7 – What do you see the
current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one?
What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Putting together a book requires physical structure
(walls, food, money). The people I care about want to make books, or not,
and keep their capital debt from destroying them. Or the people I care
about discuss carelessness with language and a divestment of literary arts interchangeably.
I’m also using “people” and “poets” interchangeably here. The poets
worth reading, the ones worth paying attention to, activate the complacent, or
at least expose them.

Cecilia Vicuña
on a Harriet blog post last year, “Language is Migrant,” writes about living under the Chilean dictator Pinochet: “Complex
public conversation goes extinct. Maybe the extinction of playful free speech
is related to the extinction of species we are causing as we speak.” Vicuña here matches ecological catastrophe with
language. Often it’s thought that pain breaks down language, or that writing
and art are in response to suffering. Vicuña
inverts the locus of agencies. One cannot say that one catastrophe begets the
other; our contemporary catastrophes saturate each other. Language and the
material world seep together, annihilating each other through political and
ecological catastrophe. Look at the effort by dominating political forces
to neglect flood zones or entire communities devastated by weather events, or
colonialist war events (Marshall Islands comes to mind as a horrific
intersection of all these things. Here’s an article that goes into that a little bit).

By contrast, consider the terra we actively
maintenance: the SUPERFUND site under Silicon Valley, where pipes and pumps
suck thousands of gallons of contaminated water every hour from vast
underground pools, which then gets shipped, treated, and burned in places like
Oklahoma and Arizona, discharging waste in small towns and on a Native American
reservation—all in the hope of making the water drinkable again and protecting
workers of the tech giants such as Google and Symantec from toxic vapors. This
toxic trail, like Echo’s (in)articulation, becomes an act of dispersement, a
stain that seeps into the water supply that Narcissus gazes helplessly into. We
cannot turn away from the reflection, we cannot turn away from language, nor
can we turn away from the semantics of industrialized progress.

8 - Do you find the
process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Definitely both. I’m pretty defensive about my
choices, and I really value friends and editors who ask me questions in ways
that open up the possibility for other choices.

9 - What is the best
piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Don’t eat sand.

10 - How easy has it
been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see
as the appeal?

I personally don’t benefit from their separation.

11 - What kind of
writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a
typical day (for you) begin?

I do a lot of writing on my phone on trains. I
can be a typical house cat with my writing structures. Consistently, in
the mornings, in the same spot.

12 - When your writing
gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)
inspiration?

14 - David W. McFadden
once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that
influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I think it’s useful to know the rules for all these
material realities and languages, in order to imagine better ways to build
communities.

15 - What other writers
or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your
work?

Anna Kavan wrote a book called Ice, which
changed the trajectory of a section of Serenade afterwards. Albert
Camus’ American Diarieswas a troubling, important read. For a
while, the 2nd section of Serenade bore an epigraph from his diaries
(“Endless good weather.”). It was maybe when I was reading it for the
first time, but the way he wrote about his depression went deep for me.

16 - What would you
like to do that you haven't yet done?

My response to this is a little NSFW. So I’ll
go with visit Lisbon so I can Instagram a picture of me with Pessoa’s statue.

17 - If you could pick
any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you
think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’ve always been a writer.

18 - What made you
write, as opposed to doing something else?

I mean, here in gig culture, we all do a lot of
things to keep afloat.

19 - What was the last
great book you read? What was the last great film?

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens lives in Midwest and
is the author of three full length poetry collections: Your Best Asset is a White Lace Dress, (Yellow Chair Press, 2016), The Messenger is Already Dead (Stalking
Horse Press, March 2017) and We’re Going
to Need a Higher Fence, tied for first place in the 2017 Lit Fest Book
Competition. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She is also the author of
nine chapbooks. Her chapbook She Came Out
From Under the Bed(Poems Inspired by
the Films of Guillermo del Toro) recently came out from Dancing Girl Press.
Recent work can be seen at or is forthcoming from Prelude, Cleaver, Kestrel, Yalobusha Review, decomp,
and Inter/rupture. Visit: http://jennifermacbainstephens.wordpress.com/

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your
life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel
different?

My very first book was my chapbook Every Her Dies (ELJ Publications,) and
that changed things for me since that was the first chapbook I ever wrote and I
didn’t know anything about the submission process or chapbooks or how one
should try to publicize their own work to some extent. So that was a big
jumping off point for me.

My second full length poetry book, The Messenger is Already Dead, is
different from my earlier work in that I felt comfortable writing more surreal
poems and poems inspired by art and films and some of these poems are more
experimental in general.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say,
fiction or non-fiction?

I came to poetry when I joined a
small writing group when I lived on a mountain in CA. It was a small community
and I didn’t know anyone and I was looking to find people that I had something
in common with. I lucked out, as I am still friends with these people today,
but that is what really started my interest in poetry. Because they were all
poets.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing
project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do
first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come
out of copious notes?

Initially I just like to get the
work down on the page. It will be messy and unfinished but there might be an
idea there. Then ideally I return to it and revise until it feels right to me.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an
author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you
working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I finish the poem when it feels
done- normally my pieces are pretty short. The longest poem I wrote recently
was three pages long. That poem was sort of a surreal story though, about a
malevolent force trying to enter a house, a presence to deal with, so it sort
of built in suspense I guess?

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative
process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I really enjoy doing readings. I
think I learn something about my poems when I read them aloud- when I am
practicing for the reading- and I also like how maybe at the last minute you
can change up what you were going to read based on the crowd and what the tone of
the room is like. I would like to do more readings.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your
writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What
do you even think the current questions are?

I just write what is inside me at
the moment. It is hard for me to do prompt work at times, though I enjoy it
when it works out.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in
larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the
writer should be?

I think the role of the writer in
our larger culture is to keep getting their voice heard. There seems to be (or
I guess it always existed) a negative force that wants to silence people, no
matter who they are. So if writers can keep expressing themselves, their
truths, that is a win for all of us. I do love it when I read words and it
makes me think of new things, or a new way to think about something. I always
love that surprise.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside
editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I think an outside editor can be a
great addition- having that extra pair of eyes on your work- can be helpful. As
long as there is mutual respect and caring about each other and the work.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not
necessarily given to you directly)?

The best piece of advice I ever got
was – just show up. Do the work. Get it down. Don’t judge it. Just get it down.
There is time for judging later.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres
(poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I’ve written a few flash fiction
pieces and I think two flash non-fiction pieces in my life- so I hope to do
more of these things but at the moment I mostly do poetry.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do
you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I’m a single, working mom. I try to
write a few times each week. I don’t have a set routine at the moment. But even
if I can get a draft down in twenty minutes, that feels good to me.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or
return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I love looking at visual art, or new
movies, or poets I love. I will re-read their work. Or just go for a hike.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Pine reminds me of my father’s
house. Because one of his first homes was in the woods in Ohio where there was
this creek in the back yard and lots of trees.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books,
but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music,
science or visual art?

Yes all of these items influence me-
it depends on the day. But I’ve probably written poems inspired by all of these
things.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your
work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I really love surrealism whether in
fiction, poetry, or other art forms. So I am drawn to this style/these writers
in my life.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I have some interest in getting my
MFA. I am a self-taught writer- so I think about that sometimes.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what
would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing
had you not been a writer?

I would toss out these ideas: modern
dancer, because I love how they tell a story without saying anything, an urban
planner, because I hate strip malls, and I love seeing how people use space in
creative ways, or a fashion designer because I love clothes.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something
else?

Writing just always seemed the best
way to get the thoughts from my brain out into the world.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the
last great film?

I just finished working on 31 Anne Rice “found poems” for the month of October.Along with thirty-five other writers, I posted a found poem to my tumblr
account and then reposted it to a private Facebook page. Each of us was
assigned our own Anne Rice book. It was pretty wild.

Peterborough ON: I like that Justin
Million and Elisha May Rubacha are producing small literary objects through
their bird, buried press [see my 2016 Open Book profile on them here], whether events, broadsides or chapbooks, and
one of their latest is Ottawa poet Tim Mook Sang’s chapbook A Functional History (2017). Some of the
narratives he’s constructed have an interesting flow, and the run-on prose
poems/sections are a bit more interesting than the poems constructed in more
traditional ways. Still, I wonder why it is he isn’t writing short stories, or
at least composing each of these entirely as prose-poems? I am unclear as to
why some of the line breaks exist.

the
sinking of the BX

it came to nicole’s understanding that the
riversteamer ran back when those kinds of boats went up and down the fraser
hauling cargo and people and card games with jazz blowing off their decks
across the water and into the trees of the surrounding forest that made the
city

she came to understand that the vessel sank in
1919 under mysterious circumstances at an infamous rock after which the ship
had failed to be salvaged spending the lonely winter weighted by a hundred tons
of bagged cement that hardened in the water as it froze

every northern city had a BX pub or hotel that
used the sternwheeler for namesake

every place that anyone had ever been had
places like these preserving their heritage anything to make them unique

The
poems of A Functional History engage
with histories that have shifted, have been lost, and require salvage, working
the stories of history against the histories themselves. The narrative of “The
Great Lakes Storm of 1913” is broken into stanzas for the sake of different
voices (again, why is this a poem over, say, a performance work or short
fiction?). Where he breaks out of the straightforward narrative is where the
poems really seem to come out of themselves and do something a bit further.
Either way, I am intrigued by this short work; but I would like to see him push
further, keep going.